1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a medical diagnostic report forming apparatus. More specifically, the present invention is directed to such a report forming apparatus capable of easily attaching medical diagnostic image data on the medical diagnostic report with doctor's comments.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In general hospital report supervising systems, when a radiological doctor diagnoses medical examination images acquired by X-ray apparatuses or the like, he forms medical diagnostic reports based upon his diagnostic judgements, and then furnishes these diagnostic reports to departments which request such diagnosis and simultaneously stores them, which will be available during subsequent medical examinations. A typical medical diagnostic report is mainly constructed of four information columns and relevant image data. That is, they are a patient information column on which a name of a patient and a birthday of the patient are described; an examination information column on which an examination date and a name of examining department are described; a clinical information column on which clinical information of the patient is described; and a doctor's comment data column on which doctor's comments are described. The relevant image data required for explaining his diagnostic judgements is attached to the fourth information column (i.e., doctor's comment column) with a free space. This implies that any of report forming persons, e.g., doctors must input medical image data of patients into such doctor's comment data column every time the diagnostic report is formed, which necessarily requires cumbersome operations as well as heavy workloads.
Furthermore, since each of the image data is contained in each of such medical diagnostic reports, a memory having a large memory capacity is necessarily required so as to store these medical diagnostic reports.
On the other hand, in another conventional medical report forming apparatus, a plurality of image data on various patients have previously been registered in this report forming apparatus in order to avoid such heavy workloads given to doctors that the image data are acquired by utilizing the image scanner and film digitizers every time the doctors form the medical diagnostic reports.
In general, 8 different sorts of images are registered in a single memory page, which can be displayed on the monitor at the same time. Then, a doctor seeks a desirable image from a first memory page containing 8 different images. If there is no desirable image in the first memory page, then he must screen a second memory page containing 8 sheets of medical images different from those of the first memory page. If the desirable image is not available from the second memory page, then he must continue his search operation for the subsequent memory pages. However, the order of 8 different sheets of medical images contained in the respective memory pages is always the same, and furthermore the images contained in the memory pages are always and successively displayed in the order from the first memory page to the last memory page, irrelevant to their frequencies of use. This implies that the cumbersome and useless image-searching operations must be repeated until the desirable image is available.